Coastal adaptation at Klasies River main site during MIS 5c-d (93,000–110,000 years ago) from a southern Cape perspective

Mareike J. Brenner · Kokeli Peter Ryano · Sarah Wurz

23 citations0/0 files storedThe Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology

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Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology Archaeology and Rock Art Studies Maritime and Coastal Archaeology

Abstract

Coastal adaptation in the southern Cape can be seen around 100,000 years ago in sites such as Klasies River, Blombos Cave, and Pinnacle Point, representing the occupation of a new niche by early Homo sapiens in this region. However, there is relatively little information available on the details involved in fully entering this niche from a regional perspective. At Klasies River main site (KRM), evidence for coastal adaptation occurs in early MIS 5. Here we explore the variability in shellfish exploitation and how it links to lithic technology, in deposits dating to ca. 93,000–110,000 years ago. We compare this to broadly contemporaneous assemblages from Pinnacle Point 13B and Blombos Cave. The lithics in all the layers from KRM investigated here have been produced according to a unidirectional reduction system, but the lowermost assemblages contain more small debitage and bladelets, and no tools. These 110 ka layers are associated with a lower shellfish density and more diverse range of shellfish species and a higher lithic density. This points to a lesser dependency on shellfish coinciding with higher mobility in the lower layers. For the younger MIS 5c layers higher volumes of shellfish and the dominance of certain species is evident. The lithics show that all the stages of the reduction system are present and tools are produced and used on-site. This indicates a residential (provisioning of place) occupational strategy. Compared to other sites on the southern Cape coast, KRM shows exceptionally high densities in lithic artifacts while the shellfish densities are comparable to the Blombos M3 phase. The results of the analysis of the shellfish and lithic densities, technological patterns, and shellfish species exploited at Klasies River, Blombos Cave and Pinnacle Point, demonstrate a more diverse onset and expression of coastal adaptation during early MIS 5 than apparent from current literature.

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References

2001Blombos Cave, Southern Cape, South Africa: Preliminary Report on the 1992–1999 Excavations of the Middle Stone Age Levels 2001Settlement dynamics of the Middle Paleolithic and Middle Stone Age 1983The middle stone age at Klasies River mouth in South Africa 1995Mousterian Lithic Technology 2010Pinnacle Point Cave 13B (Western Cape Province, South Africa) in context: The Cape Floral kingdom, shellfish, and modern human origins 1976The Mammalian Fauna of the Klasies River Mouth Sites, Southern Cape Province, South Africa 2002Variability in the Middle Stone Age Lithic Sequence, 115,000–60,000 Years Ago at Klasies River, South Africa 1995Two Late Pleistocene-Holocene Archaeological Depositories from the Southern Cape, South Africa

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2022U-Th dating, taphonomy, and taxonomy of shell middens at Klasies River main site indicate stable and systematic coastal exploitation by MIS 5c-d

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